"Despite the stated goals of this project — to recapture on film the dignity of these young women — in the end what we get are 83 portraits that evoke only a single frozen moment in each women’s life, one that has everything to do with suffering and sorrow.
Although it seems that the young women might be in a limbo of officialdom, they still, one imagines, have come out of a harrowing time with different stories of before and after, different identities, different dreams and different possibilities in their lives ahead. Yet, there is nothing of this either in Searcy’s phenomenally tone-deaf rendition of the lament of the newspaperman in Africa nor in the images that resulted from all her hard work. The portraits are shot through the lens (sic) of an historical artefact from Nigeria’s past — the 1974 portrait of Adetutu “Tutu” Ademiluyi, by Ben Enwonwu. This portrait, though beautiful, also has a story of expropriation and disappearance and rediscovery attached to it...
It is, though, astonishing that the New York Times would juxtapose such a collection of images with the story of a journalist’s tough road to capture them. It is quite literally a ludicrous juxtaposition between the extreme trauma and violence all of the photographs’ subjects have experienced and the pathetic struggles of an American writer in search of a particular image. It is, too, this image that beggars belief."
https://africasacountry.com/2018/05/how-not-to-photograph-nigerian-women-again
FB: "The women in Ferguson’s photographs are young but seem old, they are beautiful but worn, stoic but sad. We can tell they are different women through the changing cloth of their head wraps or dresses or perhaps a slightly different angle of the body or head. There are glimpses of particular selves, a glint of anger in the eyes, an attempt to smile, a direct look into the camera. But these are flattened out by this choice to photograph women with such complex lives through the medium of a single portrait"
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